Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Headlines - Wednesday

There's a new fashion star in town, and she's a fiscal conservative hockey mom!

The Republican National Committee appears to have spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.

Senator McCain? The chicken is home...were would you like her to roost?

Now, Palin's qualifications to be president rank as voters' top concern about McCain's candidacy - ahead of continuing

President Bush's policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq.

It's pretty ironic that the very thing that McCain's Boys thought would win the election for him turns out to be the biggest worry among voters, and the thing that will probably lose the election for him.

There's a measure of poetic justice there. I like that.

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An Immelmann is a precise aerobatic maneuver in which an airplane performs a half-roll to reverse its direction. A Bachmann is sloppier but more spectacular: To perform a Bachmann, a candidate for Congress puts her foot in her mouth, talks stupidly for seven minutes and watches her reelection campaign burst into flames.

Remember when Bush scheduled all those Guantanamo Bay military tribunal "war crimes" trials of alleged terrorists evildoers for October to give McCain a boost with the voters? Well the trials are still going on, though no one in the media is paying much attention to them. And guess what? They aren't exactly getting the results the Bush administration expected.

What a waste. All that torture, all those unlawful detentions, all those Geneva conventions broken, all our national good will and our reputation squandered and they still can't get a conviction.

Prosecutors drop charges for only one reason: They have no fricking case! None. Nada. The only evidence they likely had were confessions obtained by torture. Which was why the previous Military prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who was assigned to their cases quit. He didn't want to take part in any damn show trial to convict people with evidence that he knew was tainted. He didn't want to be a participant in something so immoral, so illegal, so disgusting and so unjust as what the Bush administration had ordered the Pentagon to do. And I guess no one else among his fellow prosecutors was willing to take up the ball and run with it, either. At least not before the election. Lawyers aren't stupid. They know participating in such illegal, rigged trials is a violation of international law, of US law and of the oath they took as attorneys. Some of them still want to have a career after Gitmo is shut down.

Oh, but what a far greater waste for the detainees who are still imprisoned at Gitmo. Years in a hellhole of a prison. Constant abuse. Torture. Trumped up charges. And now all charges dismissed because their prosecutor had a conscience, but for how long? Because don't expect President Bush to let any of these poor, miserable brutalized prisoners go. He'll let the next administration take the blame for releasing "terrorists." Count on it.

Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to usher in a McCain presidency.

The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, "impetuous" Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier," the message said. "Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush."

SITE Intelligence Group, based in Bethesda, Md., monitors the Web site and translated the message.

"If al-Qaida carries out a big operation against American interests," the message said, "this act will be support of McCain because it will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida then will succeed in exhausting America till its last year in it."

I wish I could say it was insulting that the person who wrote this thinks that Americans are so stupid that they would rally behind the candidate of the party that allowed Al Qaeda to commit not one but two attacks on American soil -- and did nothing to retaliate against those who actually committed the first one; that they would not be able to put two and two together and see the ineptitude of the Republican approach to terrorism.

But then I think about McCain/Palin voters and realize that while it might be insulting to me, it describes all too many Americans.

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How to make a profit in Iraq

Step One: Get $185,000 in cash from the U.S. government.

Step Two: Misplace the cash.

Step Three: Bill the U.S. government for the missing $185,000.

Step Four: Collect an additional $57,000 in processing fees for submitting the paperwork to get the money replaced.

Senator Obama's supporters have been saying some pretty nasty things about Western Pennsylvania lately. [audience boos] And, you know, I couldn't agree with them more. [audience WTFs] I couldn't disagree with you— I couldn't agree with you more than the fact that— Western Pennsylvania is the most patriotic...

Sarah Palin says the Vice President is "in charge of the United States Senate." Um, not exactly. Update: Kagro X has more on why Palin's answer was just so thoroughly stupid.

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The brain trusts on the McCain/Palin campaign, who decided that the same week Bush's economic policies caused the government to nationalize the banking system was a good time to label Obama a socialist, should be kicking themselves. Instead, Sarah Palin and John McCain keep on kicking a McCarthy-era dead horse.

"Obama is about as far from being a socialist as Joe The Plumber is from being a rocket scientist," said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution. "I think it's hard for McCain to call Obama a socialist when George Bush is nationalizing banks."

And this from Bruce Carruthers, a sociology professor at Northwestern University: "Obama is like a center-liberal Democrat, and he is certainly not looking to overthrow capitalism. My goodness, he wouldn't have the support of someone like The Wizard of Omaha, Warren Buffet, if he truly was going to overthrow capitalism."

I doubt Sarah Palin knows who Warren Buffet is, let alone the definitions of the various systems of government. She just continues reading from her Campaigns for Dummies playbook, throwing out whatever phrases make her rally participants cheer. After all, most of them don't know the difference either.

On Monday, a Missouri-based television reporter asked McCain whether he was proud of a smear-laden mailer sent out by the RNC on his campaign's behalf. McCain's reply: "Absolutely."

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Merrill Lynch executive vice president Peter Kraus "is likely to leave with more than $10 million in compensation" after the company was bought by Bank of America last month. "He isn't affected by a provision in the government's rescue plan that curbs executive compensation, a person familiar with the situation said," the Wall Street Journal noted. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Merrill Lynch "plans to cut about 500 jobs in its trading division as Chief Executive Officer John Thain shrinks the workforce to gird for a recession."

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John McCain stopped in Columbia on Monday afternoon....

A crowd of about 15 people assembled outside the airport's fence to see him descend from the plane.

Campaign volunteer Jane Stuart said in 2000, when then-Republican presidential nominee George W. Bush visited the airport there was a much larger crowd.

That's beautiful. McNutjob is even less popular than Chimpy von Cokespoon.

Meanwhile, at an Obama rally:

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E & P Pub: The Asheville (N.C.) Citizen Times reports, "A dead bear was found dumped this morning on the Western Carolina University campus, draped with a pair of Obama campaign signs, university police said."

Maintenance workers at 7:45 a.m. found a 75-pound bear cub dumped at the roundabout at the entrance to campus, said Tom Johnson, chief of university police. "It looked like it had been shot in the head as best we can tell. A couple of Obama campaign signs had been stapled together and stuck over its head," Johnson said.

Maybe a College Repug did this, but more likely it was some bozo who thinks college students are communists because they want an education, and had to kill a baby bear to make some insane point. That's beyond despicable.

Barack Obama's favorability "is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years" of New York Times/CBS polls. Meanwhile, the Times reports, Sarah Palin's "negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign."

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Afghan journalism student Pervez Kambaksh, convicted of "insulting Islam" for downloading material about women's rights from the Web and sentenced to death in a four-minute trial, has had his sentence reduced to a mere 20 years in prison. So really, the invasion and seven-year occupation of Afghanistan has all been worth it.

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Most Insultingly Implausible Excuse of the Day: Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was supposed to go to a regional summit in Swaziland for negotiations to save the doomed power-sharing deal that Robert Mugabe signed but never intended to honor, but he has not been issued a passport because... Zimbabwe is running out of paper. That's what the government said. Because of sanctions, it said (and possibly because these days you now need a dump truck full of Zimbabwean currency to buy one peanut).

Second Most Insultingly Implausible Excuse of the Day: Ted Stevens, testifying at his trial, on why an expensive lounge chair given to him seven years ago should not be considered a (unreported) gift: "We have lots of things in our house that don't belong to us". Indeed, "I don't know how it got in the house."